The trucks and trailers has always been my very
special interest as long as I could think. Born in 1956, as a boy I could
see famous trucks like BÜSSING, KAELBLE, KRUPP, FAUN, HANNOMAG, HENSCHEL
and more on the roads and you could see me at every construction site in
my home city Wolfsburg.
At the age of approx. 10 years I was wondering about the rear axle
steering of a Scheuerle 4-axle trailer and made some models building this
steering system. This was one of the reasons for my special interest in
steering geometry and later on I did a lot of calculation-sheets to
simulate the steering system and to calculate the steering angle of a
given system, the deviation from the correct (theoretical) value and
optimise the geometry (position of levers and rods) for lower steering
angle deviations. This was done before I started getting educated as an
engineer.
I studied mechanical engineering from September 1973 to January 1977, so
I was nearly 21 years old when I pass the engineers exam.

German truck BÜSSING 8000

...my
profession (part 1)

After one
year at the army, where I passed my truck drivers licence test, I got an
employment as an design engineer 600 km away from home in south Germany
at the KAMAG Transporttechnik in Ulm in 1978, where I gained my first
experience in design work for heavy load transporters for ship yards and
steel works (for example: several transporters for the NASA Space
Shuttle Canister or the 1984 build 11-axle 300 ton self-propelled unit
for British Steel Corporation in Sheffield, in 2001 still working!), but
never "on-road"-vehicles.

At KAMAG Transporttechnik (founded 1969 by Karl Weinmann and F.X. Kögel)
I learned a lot of the engineering of self-propelled heavy load
transporters, which we built uniquely customer specialized.

KAMAG Typ 1507+4für BRITISH STEEL CORPORATION

...my
profession (part 2)

Nearly ten years later (January 1987) I started at
Goldhofer with the towbarless aircraft tractor project. One year as a
completely "one-man-show" in the design department, the second
year with an additional female draughtsman making with me all the
layouts and drawings for all parts of the completely new product (bear
in mind that Goldhofer formerly built only trailers without any
self-propulsion-units, no experience for drivers cab with all the
electrics and so on...). After two years (end of January 1989) the first
prototype was ready for testing with Swissair in Zurich airport.

Since then our team increased steadily and we designed a completely line
of different towbarless aircraft tractors, hydrostatic driven for the
hole range of civil aircrafts from BAe146 up to B747 (from 100,000 lbs
up to 1,000,000 lbs take off weight) and since
April 2005 you could see our 800 hp powered AST-1 X 800 for the new Airbus A380 (which
could have a max. weight of approx.
1,300,000 lbs) on test-runs
at several European Airport.

By mid of 2005 more than 250 Goldhofer AST towbarless aircraft tractors
are in operation and worldwide more than 5,0 Mio push-back-operations
and maintenance towings are done with Goldhofer AST tractors.

AST-1 X 800 is finished!

...my hobby

As I have been working in this industry for
nearly 30 years, I have found that no company has consequently archived the
history of their technical development and the people who know the
historical steps are retiring one by one. So I try to collect
information about the history of the heavy haulage business in the
little spare time I have (main interest: heavy haulage trailers, because
there are a lot of books regarding the trucks).

This basic interest is the reason to built up this web-site.

I try to
get contact to more people around the world to get more information,
especially about the heavy haulage trailers. May be, I can collect
material enough to publish a printed version of this "HEAVY HAULAGE
HISTORY" in future days.

The first
documentation I finished together with Mr. Lothar Husemann in July 2005
is the book:

HEAVY
HAULAGEVEHICLES built by GOLDHOFER

The first
edition, which was published by Motorbuch Verlag Stuttgart / Germany,
has 232 pages and is

NOW available in English!

You will find more than
400 very interesting pictures of the actual program, mainly in colour,
but also historic b/w photographs and different drawings from the begining of "Allgäuer Fahrzeugwerke Alois Goldhofer KG".

My basic interest about technical history is the
reason for buying some books (as my wife told me: "too much
books...") and another interest and so also a main part of my books
is about airships-history and airship-technology.

ZEPPELIN LZ 129 over New York

...a big
help

My most used tool for mobile data collecting, not
only for the historical data, is the PSION Computer with his absolutely
stable EPOC operating system.

Started in 1995 with the famous Series 3a, I am working today with
the Series 5mxPro and the PSION netBook.